:: grepninjalog ::

GrepNinja's weblog is a somewhat ordered collection of thoughts and resources mostly related to software engineering. It simply tracks what
GrepNinja finds technologically useful, interesting, or amusing at some given point in time. Warning: high techno-geek factor!

Technical Pursuit Inc. does a web-based Smalltalk-like IDE with and for JavaScript (actually, ECMA Script). Actually, this is a *very* interesting product. They also sell a stand-alone IDE and other tools. This is commercial stuff, not free or Open Source (except what you can get via "view source" in your browser).

First, bear in mind that I (GrepNinja) love Squeak. It is not above criticism, however, particularly from new people, and this new critique is an example of one fairly savvy novice's experience: "My Week With Squeak (a critique)."

Below, I am posting all the stuff I entered into the Greppery while Blogger was down this morning. Let's see if I can get it to post and publish here now.
Note: Blogger was down this morning; so, I recorded some GrepNinjaLog entries there and then copied them here.
Dustman, Andy, MySQLdb: a Python interface for MySQL.
Data compression is on the GrepNinja mind these days. In particular, I am researching XML compression techniques and also am looking for methods suitable for compressing small payloads. I added some significant XML compression references to GrepNinjaLog yesterday. Let's gather a few links.
Some data compression links:

That's enough for the moment. I can always add more later but I could end up following these linked links interminably. I must often force myself to remember that every practical algorithm should provably terminate.
BTW, during this research, I made the GrepNinja "cool discovery of the day!" Check out the NEC Research Index!
Next topic is automated indexing software. I remember, in the old days, using and reading about permuted indices (permuted indexes). I liked working with them but now I find I have a need for some really good automated indexing and summarizing tools and I do not have them. After fumbling around looking for "permuted index" and its variants, I broadened my search to go after automated indexing systems.
Automated indexing links:

UWIN, by AT&T Labs Research,
provides "a mechanism for building and running UNIX applications on Windows NT, Windows 98, and Windows 95 with few, if any, changes necessary." It looks like it's basically a Cygwin alternative but GrepNinja has not adequately confirmed this yet. UWIN is *not* free for commercial use; commercial licensing is available (looks like it is around $199 for single user through Wipro).
One very cool "proof of concept" for UWIN is the Global Technologies, Ltd. port of the
Linux Gnome Desktop for Windows.
AT&T Research also provides a number of other interesting
software tools. Read any license carefully before downloading and using any of this software!

Recently, I have seen several references to the
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). I remember the Dublin Core from a number of years ago when some strange librarian-types started talking about some then-crazy ideas for having "interoperable metadata standards" for information on the Internet. Looks like they've come quite some distance from those days.
GrepNinja hereby rates the Dublin Core as an instance of the MustKnowAbout class.

Latest RSS News collects and presents information on RSS (RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary). RSS enables "syndication" of your websites. The site is maintained by Aaron Swartz, creator of Blogspace.

The
Jay Ponder Lab presents information and code related to what's going on at
Folding@home. You can join the Folding@home effort by donating some of your unused processor cycles. This is a distributed processing venture similar to
Seti@home,
United Devices, and
Entropia. Really, there are *a lot* of distributed processing projects these days and you should be able to find one that matches your interests. To check out some of these projects, you can do this Google search.

I've been flustered, lately, because I once had a browser add-on that did really neat highlighting and annotation. After changing companies, I forgot the name of the service and where it was. Even using Google to search for "web page highlighter," etc., didn't help.
Through my search, though, I found iHarvest, which is pretty cool and did much of what I wanted.
Still, I found myself missing the mysterious tool I once had and finally I got an upgrade email from the company that makes the cool tool, EQuill.com. EQuill.com makes a whole set of products based around the notion of "visual markup." Some of these tools would, IMNSHO, be *great* for collaborative work. Do check them out!